Author pens a cross-cultural love story

Feb. 16, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Alison Singh Gee is the author of the new memoir, "Where the Peacock Sings: A Palace, a Prince and the Search for Home." MICHAEL LARSEN

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"Where the Peacock Sings" is the story of a Chinese-American woman from Southern California who moves to Hong Kong and falls in love with a man from India. Along the way she discovers his family has a 100-room palace back home in India, his mother-in-law might not entirely approve of her, and her own past family issues have affected her life, too. It's a funny, loving, vividly told tale.

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Alison Singh Gee and Ajay Singh pose for a wedding portrait.

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Alison Singh Gee, seen here at Mikimpur, the 100-room haveli, or palace, that her husband Ajay Singh's family has owned for generations.

Alison Singh Gee book events

Wednesday, March 6: At 7 p.m. she'll discuss and sign her book at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in the Bella Terra shopping center, 7881 Edinger Ave., Huntington Beach.

When Alison Singh Gee decided to write a memoir about falling in love with an Indian and her passage to India that followed she saw it as a breezy tale of exploring the mysterious ways of the subcontinent with her husband-to-be by her side.

"I wanted to write the book as sort of an 'Under the Tuscan Sun' meets 'Monsoon Wedding,' where everything is great," Gee says. "And my agent said: 'You're joking, right? You can't just write pretty little portraits of India, it's not going to work. You're going to have to find out what this experience meant to you.'"

The book she eventually finished – "Where the Peacock Sings: A Palace, a Prince and the Search for Home" – accomplishes just that. In it, Gee, who comes to Orange County to sign and talk twice in the next few weeks, goes beneath the pretty surfaces of the people and the places of her life to find deeper, harder truths about herself, her family, and her world.

Gee says it wasn't all that long after she met and fell for Ajay Singh that she saw the possibilities of a book in their love story. She was a Hong Kong-based feature writer for Asiaweek magazine, a glamour girl comfortable in her Jimmy Choo stilettos and smart little cocktail dress. Singh was the Delhi correspondent for the magazine and a much more down-to-earth soul.

And all her Hong Kong society girl friends thought she was nuts to trade their world for his.

"My heart said one thing and everyone around me said another thing – and my head sometimes thought the same thing: You're going a little bit crazy," Gee says.

She brought Singh home to Los Angeles to meet her family at a point when she didn't know all that much about his background other than that he had a refined quality to him that suggested to her that he was well-born. Still, she was stunned when she overheard her mother talking to her boyfriend about his 100-room palace back home in India one day.

"I said, 'What are you talking about 100 rooms?'" Gee says. "And that's when Ajay dropped the bombshell: 'Well, that's my family home in India."

Back in Hong Kong, Gee says she couldn't resist dropping that little tidbit into the conversation the next time she got together with her friends who'd looked down their perfectly shaped noses at her guy.

"I was intent on really spreading the news about this palace," she says, laughing. "I know that sounds obnoxious but I was like, 'Oh yeah, princess in the house!' And they'd all lean in and their faces would light up and then they'd say, 'Oh my God, you have to tell this story!'"

Which she did, though it took overcoming her nervousness about ruffling feathers on both sides of her family, Gee says.

Her father, whose dreams of owning property and fine homes had influenced her own life in many ways, had died before the book was written. But criticisms of him in "Where the Peacocks Sing" didn't go over well with her five siblings, she says. Her mother wasn't upset as Gee feared she might be.

The scariest part of writing the book, though, involved talking about her mother-in-law and her initial coolness, if not outright hostility, toward the woman her son planned to marry.

"I realized that my mother-in-law could potentially be very, very angry with me and never speak to us again," she says. "I was so paralyzed with fear that when the deadline came around I'd written about 50 pages out of 300."

Ajay, her prince, decided to help by calling his mother to talk about the book.

"She said, 'Do we look like fools? Is she being mean to us?'" Gee says, recounting that call. "He said, 'She did write about how difficult the relationship was at the beginning but by the end of the book you really come off as this really wonderful, sympathetic but complicated person.'"

When he hung up the phone Gee could barely wait to hear what had happened.

"He told me she turned around and said, 'I understand that in order to sell a book you have to spice things up a bit,'" she says. "And that totally freed me to finish the book."

Her mother-in-law really need not worry about the book. By its finish, it's clear that Gee has a deep love not just for her husband but for his family members, too, and especially for Mokimpur, the expansive family estate.

After her 1999 marriage Gee worked at People magazine in Los Angeles as a West Coast style correspondent and features writer. She took a buyout a few years ago in order to spend more time with her daughter, 10-year-old Anais, and write her book. She teaches creative non-fiction at UCLA, writes freelance articles, and edits books. She also has a second book of her own in the works, partly inspired by her failed attempts to cook family meals for her in-laws in India.

"It's another memoir," Gee says. "It's got a title: 'Cooking for the Maharani: Four Continents, Six Iconic Chefs and One Tall Glass of Revenge.' Basically I'm learning to cook for many reasons but one is to go back to India and show my mother-in-law that I can master this and I can cook as well as she can."

Given that her in-laws haven't yet read the first book, might she be nervous?

"We're basically avoiding India for about 10 years," Gee says, laughing, and then quickly adding that she actually expects and hopes to spend more time there and in Asia in the future.

"I feel like I really captured an emotional truth at the time," Gee says. "I hope that anyone who reads it understands that I love my family, but these things happened and they really shaped me."

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